The Shadow of a Crime eBook

CHAPTER XI.

LIZA’S WILES.

The procession had just emerged from the lane, and
had turned into the old road that hugged the margin
of the mere, when two men walked slowly by in the
opposite direction. Dark as it had been when Willy
encountered these men before, he had not an instant’s
doubt as to their identity.

The reports of Ralph’s disappearance, which
Matthew had so assiduously promulgated in whispers,
had reached the destination which Ralph had designed
for them. The representatives of the Carlisle
high constable were conscious that they had labored
under serious disadvantages in their efforts to capture
a dalesman in his own stronghold of the mountains.
Moreover, their zeal was not so ardent as to make them
eager to risk the dangers of an arrest that was likely
to be full of peril. They were willing enough
to accept the story of Ralph’s flight, but they
could not reasonably neglect this opportunity to assure
themselves of its credibility. So they had beaten
about the house during the morning under the pioneering
of the villager whom they had injudiciously chosen
as their guide, and now they scanned the faces of
the mourners who set out on the long mountain journey.

Old Matthew’s risibility was evidently much
tickled by the sense of their thwarted purpose.
Despite the mournful conditions under which he was
at that moment abroad, he could not forbear to wish
them, from his place in the procession, “a gay
canny mornin’”; and failing to satisfy
himself with the effect produced by this insinuating
salutation, he could not resist the further temptation
of reminding them that they had frightened and not
caught their game.

“Fleyin’ a bird’s not the way to
grip it,” he cried, to the obvious horror of
the clergyman, whose first impulse was to remonstrate
with the weaver on his levity, but whose maturer reflections
induced the more passive protest of a lifted head
and a suddenly elevated nose.

This form of contempt might have escaped the observation
of the person for whom it was intended had not Reuben
Thwaite, who walked beside Matthew, gently emphasized
it with a jerk of the elbow and a motion of the thumb.

“He’ll glower at the moon till he falls
in the midden,” said Matthew with a grunt of
amused interest.

The two strangers had now gone by, and Willy Ray breathed
freely, as he thought that with this encounter the
threatened danger had probably been averted.

Then the procession wound its way slowly along the
breast of Bracken Water. When Robbie Anderson,
in front, had reached a point at which a path went
up from the pack-horse road to the top of the Armboth
Fell, he paused for a moment, as though uncertain
whether to pursue it.

“Keep to the auld corpse road,” cried
Matthew; and then, in explanation of his advice, he
explained the ancient Cumbrian land law, by which
a path becomes public property if a dead body is carried
over it.